A couple of months ago, we decided we want to give back to the industry we love so much and ran a competition where we’d give the winner a brand-new, and most importantly, free, pub website. Now, the winner has been chosen…
We’re delighted to announce that 1000 Trades, an iconic pub in the heart of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, has triumphed in Brew’s competition to win a free pub website.
Owner John’s simple, yet effective, competition application won us over in just a few words:
“We’re poor, we’re sexy, but we need a digital lick of paint”
Well, we can handle that.
So, we’re going to use this time to take you on the journey of a pub website, going behind the scenes on every step in the process, from foundation workshops to the final launch.
New pub website: Kick-off meeting
After an initial meeting (broken up around beer deliveries, customers, sales calls and everything you’d expect a busy bar to experience day-to-day) the Brew team broke the good news to John, Sam, and the team.
We had a good old-fashioned chin-wag about the pub, what’s been happening, and what their plans are moving forward. The key first step was to set up a workshop, allowing our team to extract everything we need to begin working on their brand-new pub website.
So, we got a workshop in the diary, giving us time to explore:
- Audience – who are we talking to? What do they want?
- Customer Journey – how do they reach the website? Where do they go next?
- Website content – What tone of voice do we want? How can we optimise for SEO?
- Design Exploration – What do we want the new website to look like?
Phase One: The Website Workshop
Held in 1000 Trades—like we ever need an excuse to visit the pub—our 3-hour workshop began.
Audience:
We began with the core of every website: the audience. We worked with the guys at 1000 Trades to decide:
- Who are we talking to?
- What is their challenge and reason for visiting the website?
- What would be their desired response?
- What action do we need to take to help them reach their goal?
Customer Journey:
Once we know who’s visiting a website, we can plan out their journey based on their needs. Here, we mapped our agreed audiences’ optimum journey through the website via an interactive exercise.
The output then forms the bones of the website sitemap, which will determine the navigation bar and the pages we need to build or optimise.
Website Content and TOV Recommendations:
This section involved an interactive exercise to get to the heart of the personality of the team behind 1000 Trades and the pub itself, really trying to understand: How do they want to sound on the website?
By also combining this with keyword research, we can ensure the content on the website is going to perform at its best in Google, as well as recommending any additional areas of content that would benefit the brand for their desired audiences and goals.
Website Design Exploration
Here, we come armed with visuals for discussion and ask all the questions we need from a design perspective. This being one of the most subjective areas of a website, it’s crucial to take away as much of the subjectivity as possible and focus on the reasons why we’re changing the design, and who it needs to appeal to (which, sometimes, is completely different from what a client may personally like).
With squares being a big aspect of the existing 1000 Trades logo and design, expect to see a unique take on angles and shapes as we pull together a new website design.
The journey of a pub website continues…
With a first 1000 Trades pub website workshop in the bag, we now have what we need to bring their brand-new website one step closer to reality.
Stick with us as we take you through the full pub website journey, turning everything we learned from our collaborative workshop into something tangible and sexy—that’s what John came to us for, after all.
This pub website is going to be worth a brew or two by the time we’re done.